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Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex have been identified to encode an animal's position in space, but have been hypothesized to play a more fundamental role in mental operations. A prerequisite for this is that they can be activated in the absence of movement. Here, we investigated whether firing fields of entorhinal cells are activated by movements of covert attention, in the absence of any physical movement. For , we recorded the neuronal activity of 141 neurons in the entorhinal cortex of two rhesus macaque monkeys performing a covert attention tracking task. The results reveal that movement of covert attention, without any physical movement, also elicits spatial receptive fields with a triangular tiling of the space.

When scanning a visual scene, we are in a constant decision process regar

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ding whether to further exploit the information content at the current fixation or to go on and explore the scene. In , Ehinger et al. investigated how the experimental control of fixation durations affects the balance between exploiting a current view and exploring the environment by performing a new saccade. To test this, they developed a new paradigm that allows for experimental control over fixation durations and exploration behavior. Using a large Bayesian mixed model, they show an exponential decay in the fixation time and a logarithmic increase in the number of future fixation locations. This shows that sampling and processing of the current stimulus are exhausted for long fixation durations, biasing toward faster exploration.

Due to the necessity of implementing moral decisions in autonomous driving vehicles

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(ADVs), we conducted a set of driving experiments in virtual reality. The participants experienced unexpected unavoidable dilemma situations with human-like avatars of different ages and group sizes and in
a variety of circumstances and had to decide who was to be spared. Derived from the findings, which show that participants, in general, decide in a utilitarian manner, we argue for the necessity of obligatory ethics setting implemented in ADVs. [link to the paper]

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Welcome to the socSMCs project!

As robots become more omnipresent in our society, we are facing the challenge of making them more socially competent. However, in order to safely and meaningfully cooperate with humans, robots must be able to interact in ways that humans find intuitive and understandable. Addressing this challenge, we propose a novel approach for understanding and modelling social behaviour and implementing social coupling in robots.

Our approach presents a radical departure from the classical view of social cognition as mind- reading, mentalising or maintaining internal representations of other agents. This project is based on the view that even complex modes of social interaction are grounded in basic sensorimotor interaction patterns. SensoriMotor Contingencies (SMCs) are known to be highly relevant in cognition. Our key hypothesis is that learning and mastery of action-effect contingencies are also critical to enable effective coupling of agents in social contexts. We use “socSMCs” as a shorthand for such socially relevant action-effect contingencies. We will investigate socSMCs in human-human and human-robot social interaction scenarios.

The main objectives of the project are to elaborate and investigate the concept of socSMCs in terms of information-theoretic and neurocomputational models, to deploy them in the control of humanoid robots for social entrainment with humans, to elucidate the mechanisms for sustaining and exercising socSMCs in the human brain, to study their breakdown in patients with autism spectrum disorders, and to benchmark the socSMCs approach in several demonstrator scenarios. Our long term vision is to realize a new socially competent robot technology grounded in novel insights into mechanisms of functional and dysfunctional social behavior, and to test novel aspects and strategies for human-robot interaction and cooperation that can be applied in a multitude of assistive roles relying on highly compact computational solutions

The project is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Andreas K. Engel at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. It runs from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2018.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 641321.